Rusmir Sadic

Recent research and numerous titles published in the West have proved views about “the end” of the Islamic philosophy after the death of Averroes to be unfounded, and testified to the existence of a rich intellectual tradition developed within Muslim intellectual circles. Epistemology, although inextricably linked to ontology and metaphysics, is one of the disciplines that are particularly cultivated within the later Islamic philosophical thought. This is shown in the article on the example of the doctrine of unification of intellector and intelligible (ittiḥād al-‛āqil wa al- ma‛qūl), and also on the idea of knowledge-by-presence (‛ilm al-ḥudūrī), which are categories that predominantly belong to Sadrian philosophical tradition.

The pluralistic philosophy of religion of Abdolkarim Soroush, whose neo-rationalist thought represents a genuine epistemological turn within Muslim reform discourse, is the central issue in this paper. Abdolkarim Soroush, as a contemporary Muslim thinker, brings a completely new understanding of the issue of religious pluralism and by incorporating analytical philosophy, contemporary hermeneutic tradition and Sufi metaphysics, contributes to the creation of a characteristically distinct philosophy of religion within the Muslim intellectual circle. Issues of expansion and contraction of religious knowledge, as well as the expansion of prophetic experience, are inseparable elements of his philosophy of religion.

The end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century revealed an increase in scientific interest in the problems of Islamic philosophy, especially noticeably in the West, where we encounter new achievements of already established authors, but also valuable works of younger generation scientists, who created an entirely new circle of experts within the field of Islamic philosophy. In this paper, we aim to offer an analysis of the most significant studies of Islamic philosophy during the first two decades of the 21st century, based on pointing out the most important titles, whose content and critics recommend them as paradigmatic. Critical research written in the West at the beginning of the 21st century shows that Islamic philosophy, even in its most recent phase, remains predominantly related to the metaphysical and epistemological problems characteristic of classical Muslim philosophical thought. We take as a frame of reference to present in the task outlined above, among the many authors, the works of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Peter Adamson, Massimo Campanini, Richard Taylor and Ian Richard Netton.